Anthony Powell - The Acceptance World

‘You ought to have obtained some first-hand information for him when Marx came through on Planchette.’

Quiggin frowned at this levity.

‘What rot that was,’ he said. ‘I suppose Mark and his psychoanalyst gang would explain it by one of their dissertations on the subconscious. Perhaps in that particular respect they would be right. No doubt they would add a lot of irrelevant stuff about Surrealism. But to return to Isbister’s pictures, I think they would not make a bad subject treated in that particular manner.’

‘You could preach a whole Marxist sermon on the portrait of Peter Templer’s father alone.’

‘You could, indeed,’ said Quiggin, who seemed not absolutely sure that the matter in hand was being negotiated with sufficient seriousness. ‘But what a charming person Mrs. Templer is. She has changed a lot since her days as a model, or mannequin, or whatever she was. It is a great pity she never seems to see any intelligent people now. I can’t think how she can stand that stockbroker husband of hers. How rich is he?’

‘He took a bit of a knock in the slump.’

‘How do they get on together?’

‘All right, so far as I know.’

‘St. J. always says there is “nothing sadder than a happy marriage”.’

‘Is that why he doesn’t risk it himself?’

‘I should think Mona will go off with somebody,’ said Quiggin, decisively.

I considered this comment impertinent, though there was certainly no reason why Quiggin and Templer should be expected to like one another. Perhaps Quiggin’s instinct was correct, I thought, however unwilling I might be to agree openly with him. There could be no doubt that the Templers’ marriage was not going very well. At the same time, I did not intend to discuss them with Quiggin, to whom, in any case, there seemed no point in explaining Templer’s merits. Quiggin would not appreciate these even if they were brought to his notice; while, if it suited him, he would always be ready to reverse his opinion about Templer or anyone else.

By then I had become sceptical of seeing the Isbister introduction, Marxist or otherwise. In itself, this latest suggestion did not strike me as specially surprising. Taking into account the fact that St. John Clarke had made the plunge into ‘modernism’, the project seemed neither more nor less extraordinary than tackling Isbister’s pictures from the point of view of Psychoanalysis, Surrealism, Roman Catholicism, Social Credit, or any other specialised approach. In fact some such doctrinal method of attack was then becoming very much the mode; taking the place of the highly coloured critical flights of an earlier generation that still persisted in some quarters, or the severely technical criticism of the aesthetic puritans who had ruled the roost since the war.

The foreword would now, no doubt, speak of Isbister ‘laughing up his sleeve’ at the rich men and public notabilities he had painted; though Members, who, with St. John Clarke, had once visited Isbister’s studio in St. John’s Wood for some kind of a reception held there, had declared that nothing could have exceeded the painter’s obsequiousness to his richer patrons. Members was not always reliable in such matters, but it was certainly true that Isbister’s portraits seemed to combine as a rule an effort to flatter his client with apparent attempts to make some comment to be easily understood by the public. Perhaps it was this inward struggle that imparted to his pictures that peculiar fascination to which I have already referred. However, so far as my firm was concerned, the goal was merely to get the introduction written and the book published.

‘What is Mark doing now?’ I asked.

Quiggin looked surprised at the question; as if everyone must know by now that Members was doing very well for himself.

‘With Boggis & Stone — you know they used to be the Vox Populi Press — we got him the job.’

‘Who were “we”?’

‘St. J. and myself. St. J. arranged most of it through Howard Craggs. As you know, Craggs used to be the managing director of the Vox Populi.’

‘But I thought Mark wasn’t much interested in politics. Aren’t all Boggis & Stone’s books about Lenin and Trotsky and Litvinov and the Days of October and all that?’

Quiggin agreed, with an air of rather forced gaiety.

‘Well, haven’t most of us been living in a fool’s paradise far too long now?’ he said, speaking as if to make an appeal to my better side. ‘Isn’t it time that Mark — and others too — took some notice of what is happening in the world?’

‘Does he get a living wage at Boggis & Stone’s?’

‘With his journalism he can make do. A small firm like that can’t afford to pay a very munificent salary, it’s true. He still gets a retainer from St. J. for sorting out the books once a month.’

I did pot imagine this last arrangement was very popular with Quiggin from the way he spoke of it.

‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘I persuaded St. J. to arrange for Mark to have some sort of a footing in a more politically alive world before he got rid of him. That is where the future lies for all of us.’

‘Did Gypsy Jones transfer from the Vox Populi to Boggis & Stone?’

Quiggin laughed now with real amusement.

‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘I forgot you knew her. She left quite a time before the amalgamation took place. She has something better to do now.’

He paused and moistened his lips; adding rather mysteriously:

‘They say Gypsy is well looked on by the Party.’

This remark did not convey much to me in those days. I was more interested to see how carefully Quiggin’s plans must have been laid to have prepared a place for Members even before he had been ejected from his job. That certainly showed forethought.

‘Are you writing another book?’ said Quiggin.

‘Trying to — and you?’

‘I liked your first,’ said Quiggin.

He conveyed by these words a note of warning that, in spite of his modified approval, things must not go too far where books were concerned.

‘Personally, I am not too keen to rush into print,’ he said.

‘I am still collecting material for my survey, Unburnt Boats’

I did not meet Members to hear his side of the story until much later, in fact on that same afternoon of the Isbister Memorial Exhibition. I ran into him on my way through Hyde Park, not far from the Achilles Statue. (As it happened, it was close to the spot where I had come on Barbara Goring and Eleanor Walpole-Wilson, the day we had visited the Albert Memorial together.)

The weather had turned colder again, and the park was dank, with a kind of sea mist veiling the trees. Members looked shabbier than was usual for him: shabby and rather worried. In our undergraduate days he had been a tall, willowy, gesticulating figure, freckled and beady-eyed; hurrying through the lanes and byways of the university, abstractedly alone, like the Scholar-Gypsy, or straggling along the shopfronts of the town in the company of acquaintances, seemingly chosen for their peculiar resemblance to himself. Now he had grown into a terse, emaciated, rather determined young man, with a neat profile and chilly manner: a person people were beginning to know by name. In fact the critics, as a whole, had spoken so highly of his latest volume of verse — the one through which an undercurrent of psychoanalytical phraseology had intermittently run — that even Quiggin (usually as sparing of praise as Uncle Giles himself) had, in one of his more unbending moments at a sherry party, gone so far as to admit publicly:

‘Mark has arrived.’

As St. John Clarke’s secretary, Members had been competent to deal at a moment’s notice with most worldly problems. For example, he could cut short the beery protests of some broken-down crony of the novelist’s past, arrived unexpectedly on the doorstep — or, to be more precise, on the landing of the block of flats where St. John Clarke lived — with a view to borrowing ‘a fiver’ on the strength of ‘the old days’. Any such former boon companion, if strong-willed, might have got away with ‘half a sovereign’ (as St. John Clarke always called that sum) had he gained entry to the novelist himself. With Members as a buffer, he soon found himself escorted to the lift, having to plan, as he descended, both then and for the future, economic attack elsewhere.